In 2022 we celebrated 20 years of Artquest
Artquest 20th anniversary party
Artquest’s 20th anniversary party was held on online platform Gather, a mixture of an ‘old skool’ video game and Zoom. Guests designed an avatar to use in our specially curated pixel metaverse designed by artist Jazmin Morris. Like a traditional party, guests could mingle and chat with people as they moved through 7 themed spaces.
The space included a bar, sound room, zine room, gallery and performance spaces showing emerging arts and technology that played with immersion and interaction.
At the party, we announced our new plans for supporting artists through our new and improved website and programmes like Applied and Artquest Exchange.
Resolutions window commission
We commissioned multidisciplinary visual artist and Wimbledon College of Arts alumna Catherine Chinatree to create Resolutions, a window installation at not just a shop.
Resolutions was inspired by the new years’ resolve, anticipation and memories we experience when looking both back and forward at the start of the year. It is a time to decide on new habits, remember what we have gained and lost, to do or not do something different. As we moved into 2022 in anohter semi-lockdown due to the COVID pandemic, we were all ‘taking the plunge’ and immersing ourselves, in whatever way that may be.
The work is from Catherine’s Walpole Orchestra project, a response to the daily ritual of bathing in the sea at the Walpole Bay Tidal Pool in Margate, UK. A beginner to open water swimming, Catherine observed the behaviour of other swimmers and the ecstatic response of submerging in the waters. The ecstasy and fear of being out of a comfort zone, exposing the body to very cold water, can be emotional, spiritual and physical.
Research & Insights
Artquest projects are designed to benefit artists and to find out more about how they live and work. All our projects operate as action research: a practical and reflective process of progressive problem solving within a community of practice.
Our ambition is to be the leading providers of intelligence about visual artists, bringing together insight from our programme to work strategically with policymakers, HEIs and business. We will share our knowledge with the aim of making the sector more representative, equitable, and accessible to artists from all backgrounds.
About Artquest
Artquest exists to help make the art world more equitable for artists. Over the last 20 years our work helping artists has in turn helped us to understand their working conditions, structural barriers, and professional motivations. We use this insight to develop our projects and advise the sector about how to work.
Formed in 2001, our core team is made up of artists working part-time at Artquest. We work with up to 50 freelance artists and researchers each year, and pay everyone we work with above industry rates. We also have around 30 active partnerships with arts organisations each year.
We are a programme of University of the Arts London and funded by Arts Council England as a national portfolio organisation.
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